Snowball

Ceres (image snagged from google images)

On my last visit to my sisters, I got to reminiscing about my old thoughtHobby posts to old online service GEnie, and maybe a bit later when yahoo started up, as I seem to recall posting images of my ideas drawn in HyperCard on the mac...I have them still, and maybe will dig them out and start up a blog of my thoughtHobbies...I'm not sure why I think these things up...I think it's city stress...such stress tends to turn ones thoughts to ufos and such...:)...anyway, back on GEnie, in Jerry Pournelle's 'original blog', his GEnie forum, there was chit chat about space travel and space ship designs...last I looked,  Pournelle on his blog, which he has doggedly maintained to this date, reported failing health...on GEnie, I was much charmed that one could post chat to a known author's threads, and while hesitant at first, I actually got some attention for a couple posts...one was about the atmosphere that would be made on the moon if industrial work and mining was done there...and I went on about what would a volume of water would do in earth orbit...would it freeze solid, or ablate, and melt away...I think one argument for no water on the moon then was that it would just evaporate away--light gravity, sunlight...but on my own, I studied out what would happen to water, and to be certain, I'm still not certain, but earth's distance from the sun is called the 'goldilocks' zone...it's where water can have it's three phases--ice water gas...and I think they have found frozen water in the moon's soil at the shaded poles...so I went with the thought  water would freeze solid  in earth's orbit, and one could build a spaceship with it...I've just been googling 'ice spaceship', and remarkably, there's not much...it's seems a natural, doesn't it?, to build things in space with ice--igloos on the moon!..."How big a spaceship we talking about, DavidDavid?"....oh...a mile in diameter at least, ten miles would be nice...."And where will you get that much water!!???...One very long straw...but making one wasn't my thought so much, I was considering there might already be one....Arthur C. Clarke wrote of a generation spaceship...these are spaceships that travel at modest speeds, and take generations to travel from one star to another...Brian Aldiss did a great novel about one...and Clarke's was huge...had a dinosaur habitat inside....anyway, invisioning my Snowball:...the surface was thick and frozen...the middle had like a nuclear power plant for heat...so between the middle and the surface, there was liquid water...the one idea for an ice ship I saw in the google images, proposes a torus that would rotate, and so provide gravity...there are like three real big drawbacks to space travel...radiation, no gravity, and distances...and of course getting off and on planets and moons...radiation and no gravity adversely affect our health, and we just don't live long enough to travel the long distances...but back to my Snowball...the frozen surface I imagined could be landed on by a conventional metal spacecraft, and melt it's way into the interior through the frozen surface, making an effective 'airlock'...remembering this feature, I wonder if an airlock of ice could be made, and one could melt they're way back and forth in a pod for such...climb in your suit, climb in the pod...heat, melt, exit...rinse..."This is all too far afield, DavidDavid!"...yes, I knowknow...but I like to watch the TV show 'Elementary' about a modern day Sherlock Holmes...in one episode, Sherlock was falling asleep standing up, and had a contraption that dropped a metal frying pan or something on the floor when ever he leaned over with sleep, so waking him in the self same moment he was falling asleep...explaining what he was about to Watson, he referred to Salvador Dali the artist, who would do such things to study his dreams....I googled that, and it's a real thing...Dali did that...that, is a thoughtHobby being pursued!...and in another episode, Sherlock is studying a mysterious book of plants and writing from the fifteenth century....another one!...very odd show...but the nice thing about thoughtHobbies is they are safe in one's own noggin...or blog...but the Snowball has had my interest of late, because there are real Snowballs out there...giant balls of water with frozen crusts...Ceres, Ganymede, Pluto, and likely many more out there in the ort cloud...and as things would have it, the space probe Dawn is approaching Ceres, and the space probe New Horizon is approaching Pluto, both soon, like between now and July, to begin providing close up pics!...Very cool...